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- "その男の人にお金をわたしました。"
"その男の人にお金をわたしました。"
Translation:I gave money to that man.
54 Comments
I didn't have an option for 'that', despite there being その in the Japanese sentence. The correct translation should be 'I gave the money to that man.'
It is a bit inconsistent on Duolingo, but I think the "so" series works OK for the definite article as well.
Sono and sore can refer to subjects previously visited in conversation. You could think of it like: The man we discussed earlier, I gave money to him. Or, more likely: I gave money to the man whose job it is to collect the money. He might be the only man around taking money, so you don't have to point to him and say "that" man.
As usual, it's about context.
I'll add to that: the So series can be used for shared knowledge. The sushi bar (down the road), the weird kid who picks his nose.
Interesting. I guess my confusion from this sentense stemmed from the fact that in english "to give money" usually implies to gifting it (i.e. ageru), not to hand over or pass it on (watasu)
Not in my experience. If i give money to the man, it might be because he's asking for a toll.
And there's also 譲る (ゆずる) which means "to give" as in "to hand over" or "to transfer". What's the big idea?
This sentence was very confusing. I agree with others that Kanji is almost essential here.
The first time this popped up, I said "I gave the money to that man" and it said it was wrong and that I had to use some money. So the second time it showed up, I wrote some money and it said it was wrong and that I had to use the money!!! Frustrating.
Maybe it was fixed because I wrote "I handed money to that man" and I was marked correct.
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I agree that it somehow ends up being difficult to read some of these sentences without kanji...
Hum. I didn't think so. I got confused because I saw "わたしました" and first thought "I?" Then, I realized it didn't make any sense and it was just me lacking vocabulary. I looked it up and everything was all good.
Vocabulary has been my issue in any sentence. Having the kanji only makes it easier to recognize that I don't know a word. As soon as I know the words, though, things become a lot easier to understand, especially if I listen to the sentence, say it out loud to myself, or both.
I think if you keep studying Japanese long enough you'll also start to find it difficult to read without kanji. Having kanji provides clues about where individual words begin and even whether it's a noun, verb, or adjective. Not knowing the reading for a kanji can make reading a sentence very difficult or even impossible, but that's what furigana is for - so you can see the kanji and read it even if you have never seen it before.
Agreed. I used to complain a lot about kanji but now I see why they are so necessary (a text with hiragana only honestly hurt my eyes tbh)
For people who are having trouble reading sentences without kanji, some tips:
1) Find a good online dictionary (I recommend jisho.org)
2a) Copy the entire sentence and just paste it in the searchbar. Jisho.org splits up the words for you.
You can flip through the words to see what they mean.
2b) Isolate the word you don't know by locating the particles in the sentence.
In this case, を is the last particle we see in the sentence, so we can assume that わたしました is probably the verb. Copy and paste, voila.
One day I'll understand people that think it's harder to read "without" kanji....
.... dude.... I have no idea about any kanji at all at this point of the course, except for a few 5 ones.
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I guess it depends on how much you study next to duolingo and also what your priorities are. The very best solution would be individual customization of everybodys profile, toggle ON or OFF weather you like to see the Kanji or not. Of course this would mean some work for the Duolingo staff ¯_(ツ) _/¯ but it would be the ultimate solution i guess
Unfortunately this will never happen. It would require the DuoLingo staff to reprogram the way languages are handled to fix a problem that is pretty much unique to Japanese. This is well beyond the scope of what is possible for the course contributers. They must do their best to work with the existing tools that were made to handle Western languages, primarily.
If you are looking for proper kanji support, you'll need to switch to a program that was actually built to teach Japanese and other Asian languages, like LingoDeer.
I guess for me using only kana is like writing in English in phonetics. I know the phonetic letters, so it is technically possible to read, but it is not how I should learn a language and I have to concentrate more.
Nevermind; it comes from the verb 渡す (わたす). If they showed us infinitives and Kanji/Furigana, that would've made things easier.
Think of it like learning words before the alphabet. The basic "alphabet" in Japanese is hiragana so we're getting lots of practice reading that before learning Kanji. Being bombarded with junk-tons of kanji may make things more difficult for most people if they haven't memorized hiragana and don't know sentence structure. Introducing kanji slowly as you learn the foundations of the language sounds more reasonable to me.
Besides, there are tons of resources out there to learn kanji. I use the "Kanji Study" app on my Android.
I sort of agree, but I think in this particular instance, and in a few others, they need the kanji. Or at least need the option to flip between them, so you choose.
Moreover, Duolingo sometimes takes you a step back. It introduced us to the kanji for dog some time ago, then in later lessons went back to writing it in kana. But these sample sentences would have been a great opportunity to practice reading it in a sentence. I find learning kanji by rote difficult and, alone, has a low success rate. Even breaking down their radicals can simply overcomplicate things.
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Someone who knows basic Japanese sentence structure would know that verbs come at the end of a Japanese sentence and that watashi would never appear at the end of a sentence, hence it must logically be a similar sounding verb. Of course it doesn't help that when you click on it duolingo splits watashimashita into two words - watashi and shimashita. This seems to happen a lot and really needs to be fixed asap.
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Watashi is a noun. Watashimashita (from watasu) is a verb meaning to hand over. The two words are completely unrelated.
My confusion was in the fact that I didnt see the kanji that meant "to give"
Oh god. Can you also give him some love? These boring sentences are killing me. I really need some “I gave my cat to that criminal.” ”Please do not show my porn magazine to my ex girlfriend.” “The duck copied your textbook.” “The principal snores in the library.”
Is there ever a context where その男の人 (not just 男の人) can mean all men in general, rather than a particular man or group of men?
I find myself reading these backwards to understand them better, but I KNOW this has to be bad practice since that's not now it is actually spoken aloud. :(
Is there a better way to study to grasp the order of all the sentence's particles when converting Japanese to English in your brain?
Don't think about the action until the sentence is done. The order of the sentence's particle phrases is typically given by the importance of each phrase. So I read forward, stopping at each particle to understand the pieces of info related to the sentence (building them into noun phrases and such as I move on). I don't think about how to translate the entire sentence into English until I get to the last verb.
In another part of this lesson I tried typing "I gave the teacher my homework" but Duo insisted that I needed to use "submit" for "watashimashita", yet "gave" is being accepted here...
Good word, "submit," but overkill in this context.
I handed in my homework—end of story, according to a linguistic field called "pragmatics."
I have qualms with this translation because it contradicts what I learned in my university. We were taught that 男の人 and 女の人 are always to be translated as he and she. If I translated this sort of sentence with that man on an exam, my answer would be marked as incorrect.
